Regional updates: Asia and the Pacific

Regional Board Members

Regional Network

The Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW) is a sex worker-led network whose members include national sex worker-led networks, sex worker-led organisations and community-based sex work projects representing female, male and transgender sex workers. APNSW was founded in 1994 at the International AIDS Conference in Japan and is based in Bangkok, Thailand.

After several years of intensified focus on gathering biometric data and piloting targeted surveillance methods, the Chinese government has established a large police force with the technology to enable a mass detention of sex workers, drug users and Uyghur people, a Muslim ethnic

Sex workers and sex worker rights’ organisations have strongly criticised the verdict and handling of the case of CJ Palmer, a trans woman and former sex worker who was convinced of grievous bodily harm in January 2018. CJ was convicted on the charge, after four hours of deliberation, in relation to her ex-partner testing positive for HIV, and has been remanded in a men’s prison awaiting sentencing on 16th February. She has already spent 9 months in the same men’s prison awaiting trial.

December saw another raid on a sex workers’ workplace in Tel Aviv, with 11 people arrested on charges of running a ‘prostitution ring'. The raids targeted a number of workplaces around the city’s old central bus station.